Google quietly changes privacy policy so your Gmail and Photos could be used in targeted ads - Dexerto
Google has updated its privacy policy to allow personal information from Gmail, Google Photos, and Drive to potentially be used for targeted advertising, raising new questions about how the company handles users’ private data.
The change, which took effect on October 16, introduces a significant exception to Google’s previous promise that it would not use content from these services to personalize advertisements.
As first spotted by Android Authority, the updated policy specifically affects users who connect their personal information to Google’s AI-powered services, including Search and Gemini.
https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/google-quietly-changes-privacy-policy-so-your-gmail-and-photos-could-be-used-in-targeted-ads-3421462/Open linkView original on sh.itjust.works
142 replies
Anyone happen to have a large repository of butthole pictures I can borrow?
How long until this gets used as a reason to gaslight people into using the memory leak browser? 🤔
Since it seems to be tied to Gemini settings, I think they were not able to design gemini integration in a way that separates data used by gemini from gmail and photos. Let's say if google uses your gemini chats for targeted ads, if gemini mentions your emails, that will already be part of the data being tracked for ads. So, maybe just disable gemini chat history.
Not able to seems less likely than chose not to. Google has plenty of resources to throw at the problem.
I thought i had to disable that shirt years ago. Let me guess.. they turned it back on?
Anyone recommend a self hosted alternative to Google photos?
Hands down immich.
I know multiple people below you said Immich already but to give more details: it absolutely is one of the most well run and stable self hosted apps I own. Extremely reliable and works exactly as I need it. It was one of the first FOSS applications I supported monetarily because I believed in it so much.
Just for completeness: If you are looking for an android gallery app without backup/sync and which is privacy friendly, try Fossify gallery
https://www.fossify.org/apps/gallery/
There's multiple. Immich comes to mind
Photoprism or Immich
Photos is immich for sure
Remember when the entire selling point of Gmail was lots of storage and "no obtrusive ads like Yahoo Mail or Hotmail"? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
Google has turned its back on every single thing it use to stand for. Down to the “don’t be evil” slogan.
I still miss the free unlimited 2mp backup for photos.
Turning that off topped off my storage and I've been over 90% ever since.
What a great reminder to turn off all those trackers. Thanks Lemmy!
I was thinking what a great reminder to take pictures with a camera not a phone.
To listen to music with a music player that has physical memory not cloud.
To keep things separate and private that you want to keep to yourself.
Targeted advertising should be illegal. Solves a lot of problems. You can pick an ad based on its location (sports.example.com can have sports ads and astrology.example.com star ads), but not based on who's viewing it. Now there's less motivation to read all your personal information.
Agreed, targeted advertising and collecting private information about a person and storing it should be illegal. Decentralized systems, cryptocurrency or tokenized payments, and ephemeral order data that is wiped immediately after fulfillment should be standard. The Internet should be privacy focused.
You ever tried to enforce the changes needed to stop all of that tracking on a small group of friends/family? The number of people that actually like it as long as the down sides are not put in there face is wild.
I don't mean this as disagreement, just an interesting observation about people.
Yes! Or even just any limits on targeting granularity. Like "show ads for my nail salon to all the women in a 3 mile radius" seems fine. But "show this ad to women aged 33 who have 3 cats and who have been to Kohl's twice in the last month and have watched at least 30 seconds of videos about Charlie Kirk" is just fucking insane, and they go even farther than that.
I mean yeah it’s the old way to serve ads but it’s incredibly inefficient. Even an example as broad as sports.com, ESPN+ might want to advertise but they only offer their service in the US. They don’t want to pay for impressions from users in France, so a minimum would be geo targeting based on IP.
When you get down to medium and small business, I could have some watches to sell to sports dudes, but my campaign budget is $10,000 so I would only target men 40+ because 20 year old college football fans can’t afford the product.
I don’t like the ad ecosystem but people generally don’t want to pay subscriptions for websites but like the publisher’s content. Publishers gotta get paid somehow.
Why do we have to make advertising efficient?
Personally I think advertising needs a LOT more regulation.
The entities paying for the advertising demand it. It could be untargeted but the conversion rate falls so the ROI of paying ads is less, leading to less to spend per campaign.
Publishers can show the untargeted ads but they get paid less per impression.
And that's why it should be regulated heavily. Advertising uses scientifically backed methods to short circuit people's judgement and drive consumerism.
I’ve already agreed the ads ecosystem sucks.
If you had it your way, small businesses could probably not afford to advertise online. It would only be businesses who could blanket the internet with their banners at mass scale without targeting.
We already have GDPR, TCF 2 and various other privacy frameworks and laws localized. What do you want to change?
I personally like publishers staying in businesses who produce valuable content.
If a website can tell what zip code you're in based on IP, that's good enough. If someone is using a VPN and their approximate location is obfuscated, the USER can choose to volunteer their location if they want localized ads.
Targeted advertising of any kind should be voluntary.
I also believe billboards should be taken down. Advertisers have been given carte blanche to hijack our eyes, ears, and attention without permission for far too long.
TV and radio managed just fine for years without targeted ads. They targeted the ads based on the content. Saturday morning cartoons advertised toys and ceral. Daytime TV advertises medicare advantage plans for retirees. Country radio advertises white hoods or whatever.
Meanwhile, subscription services without ads also made money.
Targeted ads were never necessary. Outlaw them and the internet and media companies won't disappear.
TV and Radio ads are somewhat targeted because at a minimum your location is known, either within the radio tower reach or the channels you have access to and/or geolocation your TV provider has access to.
Monday Night Football does not show the same ads in every region. Some are national and others are local, there is still some programattic at play. If you watch through a smart TV you’ll get CTV ads for sure.
You can still target ads based on location, but you do it through targeted content like they used to, which also g9ves us more diverse content.
When a local business wanted to put an ad out and didn't want to go nationwide, they'd advertise in the local paper. Now they just pay Google to target people, which is why 90% of local news has died.
A mix of both would be great. Something where your target your ads based on the content only, like the old days, and you don't need to know your customers at all. Only what you guess they're most likely to be interested in.
Put gaming ads on twitch streams, or pay a youtuber to be a sponsor. They're plenty of ways to "target your ads" while not needing to gather all the information you can possibly gather on every single individual in the world
Yeah there’s a been a few attempts at “privacy preserving” user id hashing like Google Topics, ID5, and many more.
Publishers love private deals for ad spend, it’s just more work and can be inconsistent vs programmatic that is less revenue but always flowing.
Most important part of the article.
Need a direct link or path... Going to hunt now.
Google account settings > data and privacy > Personalization settings > disable and delete all
Huh. Shows you how cynical I am, I already thought they were doing this.
So here's an advertisement for an advertisement? Because that's my gmail content.
Wait.... This is new? They didn't do that already? Really? I though this was the whole business model which made Google so big.
Posteo is a quality service.
Moochs. Everything has become a transaction for them.
It's not a transaction anymore, the values are skewed so heavily in favour of Google so that it is far better to pay for services that respect your privacy.
If you want to take back control of your data, there are open source alternatives to almost every Google product
this needs more visibility
Reminder that Immich has basically all the features of Google Photos and more, and you can migrate fairly easily by doing a Google Takeout.
https://www.bigiron.cc/guides/migrating-google-photos-to-immich-via-takeout
I also made a tool with my brother to share photos with others in a trip:
https://github.com/Linkee12/PhotoBin
You can create a temporary album available for 30days, and everybody can share, select what they want to save and export. You can also put it on a VPS because it's E2E encrypted, the server doesn't see your photos.
and if you can't selfhost, ente.io is also a good option. but it's a different software.
In my opinion it's also the better option if you can self-host, it's more mature than Immich.
There's also managed Immich options (although Ente is probably better in this case since it is ecrypted):
https://pixelunion.eu/
https://store.elfhosted.com/product/immich/ (although I don't think I'd trust a service that appears to be 100% AI-generated).
https://elest.io/open-source/immich
I've been using PixelUnion for some time now to test if I actually am comfortable with deleting Google Photos and I'm pretty sure I'm about to pull the trigger. They've been fantastic.
I also tried Ente but I honestly do not like them. It would be ideal if Immich were E2E encrypted but for me the difference in quality is so big that I don't mind them not being encrypted.
ente is vibe-coded
The definition of vibe coding seems to be very flexible nowadays. It used to mean using AI to generate code without looking at the code (and being a programmer being optional as well).
But some people call any AI assistance vibe coding, which makes any discourse difficult. Because anyone can say "no it's not" even though you are both in agreement about what's happening, only because the term is being misused.
I think the new definition for letting AI do all the work is cuck coding (you just tell it what to do) and vibe coding stays more integrated and involved
It launched commercially in early 2021 so the base is definitely human coded
Problem being that even a 4TB NAS costs almost 1000€ to buy or build... It's painful.
Just looked and yeah, not far off when you buy new. An old PC with a couple of hard drives can do the trick, but obviously it's more work to set up.
The used and refurb market is your friend.
For large capacity refurb enterprise-grade drives, I recommend serverpartdeals
I've had some good 16TB drives from there for a good few years and still kicking. They can be a little loud though. You can get 10TB drives for maybe €250.
A Synology 4-bay NAS can be bought second hand from eBay for about €200-€300. They aren't very powerful but might be fine for Immich and pretty easy to use. Many come with some hard drives you can pawn off or get started with using a RAID config that means if one or two die you are fine. If the drives are second hand (not pro refurb) though do not pay more than 30% of retail price because who knows how long they will last.
Photos don't take up that much space. Even 100 000 photos tends to take up less than 500GB. Video is much heavier, so if you're a videographer you may struggle without reencoding.
I love Immich and use it as my primary backup but I had been using Google Photos as my secondary backup (partially out of laziness to find a new offsite backup). Are there any other cheap photo hosts?
❤️ You rock 🫶
Odd how these headlines always ramp up as Alphabet ( Google) approaches their quarterly earnings report.
Fucking hell. Time to take all the photos down. It's been at least a decade since a photo has been uploaded there, because I knew Google can't be trusted and I disabled the automatic upload, just hadn't taken the already uploaded images down. On top of that, for months I have been in the process of moving off gmail to Zoho Mail. Fuck Google.
Taking your photos down may not remove them from their dataset. If they really wanted to they could restore them for their dataset. You wouldn't ever know.
AT THIS POINT, Google is just gonna try to replace our friends with AI that only advertise and if we say no to the ai for advertising, it sends a drone to kill us (remember there will be alternatives)
Glad you said this because I went into my Google accounts and shut all that crap off. Instead of getting ads for mountain bikes I'm going to get ads for paint brushes and manicures but at least they don't know anything about me.
They do know everything about you, and probably will sell it or exploit it in some other way, but not with targeted ads, you turned that off.
I got a year of @Thundermail.com for $72.00.
I use The Flatpak on my Desktop and grabbed it from F-Droid on my Pixel 10.
I don't even have Google Play Services installed on my daily driver/main profile. 🙃
And still people are going to say "I have nothing to hide". (edit: or any variation of This is Fine)
Maybe a few less now.
Which isnt even the point and never has been.
It is all about potential of material that someone can use against a person for likeness. Never mind having nothing to hide when anyone can invent something for you to hide.
people who have nothing to hide should let everyone see any information they have
Original source article:
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-personal-intelligence-privacy-3727111/
Also, fuck off, Pichai. You fucking banchode.
Google using Gmail to target ads has been a thing since the launch, I remember the articles about it back in the day, and still got a Gmail since it was still soo much better than alternatives like Hotmail.
They stopped doing that in 2017. Until now.
Their own phrasing:
Sounds a lot like weasel wording to me. Could be they're still scanning - for other pruposes. The article obviously does not clarify.
I'd rather they tell us all the data mining they do do.
Problem is every institution by default expects you to have gmail. If not then you need to have it. This is what fucked up.
No, every institution expects you to have an e-mail. Gmail is just one of the thousands upon thousands of providers.
Nope, ik what i wrote, they want Gmail, any other mail id is not acceptable
You will be surprised.
So surprise us??
Many Government website in my country allow only gmail, yahoo and outlook.
That's sad. What country?
Can you name one? Email, yes. Gmail though?
It happens on some pages. Doesn't let you in with "unknown" domains claiming that it's not a real email
First, he specifically said "every institution by default expects you to have gmail." Not requires a known domain. So I asked for an example.
Regarding your experience, I'd say that's still very, very rare. Certainly not "every institution" like OP claimed, and probably not even common large institutions. I'd be interested in an example of even one of those. Rejecting specific temp email domains is certainly something some sites do, but as someone that has a couple unique domains that I've used for years, large companies requiring Gmail or rejecting custom domains is not something I've experienced thus am curious about a specific example of such claims.
In my country, my school or my brother college. It is like Whatsapp, people just expect you to have specifically that since most people already use Android.
You may think that we can give any other mail but these institutions are maybe dumb to any kind of dofference.
Interesting... what country if you don't mind my asking?
Sorry won't say that, hope you don't mind.
At this point it's tempting to tell them Google has banned you.
Not at all surprising. Microsoft is already doing similar sorts of things it seems. Like on a work system, I was looking at one of our vendor sites, and Edge's AI assistant started recommending places I could get a cheaper deal for items that I stopped to look at for a bit too long. So not only do you get a shittier slop infested product in Edge, but it's also pretty much an AI powered adware that watches every page you visit, and you can't easily get rid of it / its monitoring.
Moving to Ente? Or moving to Proton family? Mixed of both?
I also found out the reported Photos usage via Google profile is way undercounted. It shows i have 30 GB of photos. I just requested a checkout of all Photos and well.... i need to download 120GB...
I think a lot of Pixel devices came with a promo where your photos don't count toward your drive space. That's also the case for me
So glad I switched to immich
"
Don'tBe Evil"There's a reason they scrapped that slogan again.
According to the article, it is off by default:
For now.
In the US you can hide that opt-in in unreadable terms, can't you? In the EU that will be harder though as there the opt-in has to be easily readable and obvious to the regular user, as well as feature an option to decline without making things non-functional that do not need that for their very functioning.
In any case, people will be surprised how inshittified AI will be able to become once they have done the same they have done to regular search.
Is protonmail the easiest switch from Gmail?
Custom domain first, then chose your email provider.
I'm on protonmail now, but was on Zoho mail before.
My custom domain allows me to switch more easily, it took me literally 3 years to switch from @gmail.com, never again.
There are many options.
If you just want [email protected] there are several safe options.
If you want [email protected] there are different safe options.
I use the second option through Fastmail.com.
What about a good Google Photos alternative? Preferably something I can self-host. (Cloud storage is fine too, 1TB minimum, $15/mo max.) I've been wanting to DeGoogle for years but haven't yet out of convenience.
Must have, no compromise features: A "Memories" feature works as good as Google's, and a search box that lets me find images by describing what's in them.
Edit: Thanks for all the helpful replies. Looks like I have a lot of homework to to! Keep the suggestions coming.
This repo exists solely to help you compare all the alternatives.
My quick look through the feature matrix, the best options (purely in terms of the number of features in the comparison) are Ente, Immich, and Nextcloud (there's both Nextcloud Photos and Nextcloud Memories—I'm not sure how they work together vs separately). Unfortunately a "memories" feature isn't in the feature matrix, but from a quick search I believe all the options I just named have it.
Immich as recommended by a few others, and there's also Nextcloud, but keep in mind Nextcloud is a little "heavier" in that it has more functions and features.
For example it can be used as a drive, calendar, contacts, notes, and photo alternative. Look into a addin for Nextcloud called memories that I personally like better than the native photo app.
I run both immich and Nextcloud, as well as a bunch of other alternatives to Google's services.
Nextcloud is awful with photos. Loads slow, no useful features for photos. Otherwise it's great but would go for immich any day when it comes to photos
I felt that nextcloud photos/memories was a bit lackluster compared to immich, but good news is, via community plugins you're able to integrate immich into your nextcloud as if it were part of the suite and you get the best of both worlds.
Nextcloud for gdrive, office, email, todo lists, calendar, Spotify, a kanban board, budget tracker, and a simple notes option (personally I prefer obsidian w/ nc file sync and I might do tiny edits/touch ups in notes since it's all markdown anyway)
Though I saw there's a way to use obsidian gui through a docker container, so you COULD use the external links feature to have it also be accessible through nextcloud, which is tempting but its more fluff that I don't feel like dealing with rn..
Are you talking about Nextcloud core, or specifically the Nextcloud Photos app?
Immich allows search for text and objects in the photos, using integrated free, local-run small AI models. I haven't used a memories feature but I believe one may have rolled out in the last update.
Honestly, Immich is a free self-host option and is incredibly close to Google Photos. I think if you're holding out for exactly identical feature parity, though, you may never be satisfied.
I don't know exactly what's in the Google Photos memories, but immich absolutely has a memories with pictures on that day in previous years.
100% Immich. Really good UI, and the kinds of quality of life features you don't normally find in smaller open source apps (auto face tagging, map based on coordinates of photos, built-in non-destructive editor, memories, etc)
The memories feature is mostly just "here's photos/videos you took on this date", but it doesn't compile any sort of custom album based on a theme or place or anything like that. Not hard to do so yourself by just going to the map view and zooming into any location though.
As for image searching it does have that, and I've found it to be shockingly reliable even when I run it on just a Raspberry Pi. (though it can take a while to give you the result of your search if you're on lower-end hardware like that)
Damnit, you had me sold up until this part. I need the memories feature to work exactly how it does on GPhotos (or in a similar way). But I still have a lot of comment replies to sort through so I'm hopeful I'll find the perfect replacement.
IDK. A lot of people like to self-host immich.
I use and android phone so this would be my next step on de-googling.
Seen Fastmail recommended before. Have you had any issues signing up for an account, where the site/service doesn't recognize your email address/domain as a valid input because it's not well known and therefore blocked. Only reason I opened a gmail again 💀, while I'm trying Tuta atm.
I was with fastmail for years. It was great, and the most sophisticated I've seen if you want that fancy web ui feel.
However, I found the pricing to be egregious for larger mailboxes.
Oh interesting, thanks for the info. Do they charge depending on how many emails you receive? If I'm understanding your last sentence right.
What are you using now?
No, you need to select a plan with enough storage quota.
If you store 10 years worth of emails for work, it gets super pricey.
I switched to mxroute. A no frills mail provider. great deliverability, but no web ui.
no problems for me but I have a .net domain
Contact them. I'm sure they give you an answer.
I would say if all you care about is having a nice looking, fully-featured, easy to use client, Proton is good, but if you really just need... an inbox with an email attached, then Tuta will be a little cheaper and just as private, just with less bells and whistles.
If you care about removing yourself from other services like calendars, cloud storage, password managers, etc, Proton is way better since it has the full suite.
For example, Proton supports auto-categorizing mail (e.g. newsletters, promotions, updates, transactions, etc), unlimited email aliases, a more modern UI, good integrations with Proton Drive and Proton Calendar if you decide to use those as well instead of Google Drive and Google Calendar, etc.
Tuta is more just an inbox that you can bother to sort as needed, comes with some aliases if you feel like it but probably not enough for every single online service you have, has a basic calendar, but doesn't have any kind of integrated Drive access (is still in closed beta rn), and has a more... basic UI.
disroot and vivaldi is totally fine
I switched and never looked back nearly 5 years ago.
Bought my own domain shortly afterwards and with Proton Pass I can generate unique emails per website using that domain, you don’t need a domain as you can use protons domains but it’s nice to have your own, can also easily disable problematic emails that cause spam.
It was a pretty straightforward switch. If you pay for Protonmail, you also get free email aliasing through pass mail, which is a massive privacy boost
Yes
Is this only some countries? I thought they legally had to email to inform you of changes to these policies where I live b
I like it for the storage, might encrypt my data on there to be safe. Honestly someone could make am app for that, but it wouldn't make it onto the store 😮💨
rclone and cryptomator both can do that
Great, so I'm going to get advertisements of an "adult" nature soon
So…. What’s a decent email client? This will be the last of the google services I have and it’s time to end it.
Proton if you want a clean UI, more fancy features, aliasing, etc.
Tuta if you want just a simple email, don't care if the UI is a little chunky, and a slightly cheaper price.
Can vouch for Tuta, exactly as you described it 😂
Any of them I can set up on my mail app on an iPhone?
Both Tuta and Proton have iOS apps of their own.
I don't believe either can be used inside the native iPhone Mail app, since they use encryption schemes, which aren't standard in any commonly used spec for mail apps, so no regularly available mail app can act as a frontend for Proton/Tuta, because no regularly available mail app "speaks" their encryption. (though on PC, Proton does have a Bridge application that can essentially perform the job of a translator in that case, but again, only for PC clients)
Fastmail
I tried all the usual ones recommended, Proton, Tuta etc, but following a recommendation from another Lemmy use, I've found Fastmail to give the best results. 60GB of email storage as well.
I like tutamail and I'll happily recommend it :)
Those advertisers are constantly subsidizing the evil tech bros. Fuck all products! /s
Oh jesus christ, can't we just be done with it at this point.
Yes you can!
Any sane person really still using Gmail?!
What sort of lemmy-ass statement is this? Of course there are sane people using Gmail.
Most people, yeah
I switched to tuta.com since a couple years back, it's been pretty good. The user experience is worse, but it's a good trade-off.
But of course it'll take many years until I'm able to get rid of my Gmail account completely. Especially since I'm using a Google phone, and my car needs a Google account since its OS is based on/integrated with Android. And some websites don't allow changing your email address, so I dunno what to do about those.
I use Gmail at my workplace. They can go right ahead and use my emails that I check using Thunderbird to send me targeted ads if I ever use their search engine (I use DuckDuckGo).
The problem is not the targeted ads, it's the data collection.
I know. I'm just stuck with gmail and doing what I can
Is there an inbox wrapper I can use for gmail on android?
I know I know just switch to proton or whatever. I have, but sometimes I still get stuff from things I've connected to gmail that i I've forgotten about.
The gmail app on android is very ad heavy.
Just looking to access my gmail from a cleaner app.
Just set gmail to auto-forward all mail to the address you actually use.
Thunderbird
If you already switched to proton, you can add Gmail to it, there’s an option to add it.
One thing to note on this is that after a week, Google told me that my account might be compromised, severed the link between Gmail and my Proton account, and forced me to log back in to my Google account on my computer.
I reconnected to Proton and it did it again a couple weeks later. Not sure if it's fixed. (or working as intended)
Gmail Forwarding is the old feature that just forwards mail, and that seems to work fine without ever kicking you off, it's only Gmail Connection (which allows sending emails from your Proton mail and having them send from your Gmail address) that's done it for me so far.
Do you just mean an email client? Then fairmail or thunderbird
Yup thanks
Is it? Or is that just a US thing? Anyway get adguard, that should help.